As you know, the NYT reported Friday morning that GE paid no federal income taxes on $14 billion in profit in 2010. Friday night, NBC News, owned by GE, chose not to cover the story, opting instead to give precious air time to new dictionary entries LOL and 'muffin top.' Stewart questions whether Obama tapped GE head Jeff Immelt to be his Chairperson of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness as a corporate demonstration on how to layoff American workers and escape paying taxes.

"I know the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people. But what they didn't realize is that those people are a**holes."

GE has a lengthy record of criminal, civil, political and ethical transgressions. Here are a few examples:

In 1995 -- with the establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission -- the full extent of GE's human experiments with nuclear radiation were revealed. General Electric ran the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington as part of America's weapons program; beginning in 1949, General Electric deliberately released radioactive material to see how far downwind the radioactive material would travel. One cloud drifted four hundred miles, all the way down to the California-Oregon border, carrying perhaps thousands of times more radiation than that emitted at Three Mile Island.

Who's watching the watchdogs? That, analysts and activists say, is the question that should be foremost in citizens' minds as they ponder the latest in a long list of scandals to hit the cream of corporate Japan.

The disturbing answer - "often, no one" - is one reason Japan finds it so hard to reform its economy despite more than a decade in the doldrums and policy-makers' promises of change.

The president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), Japan's largest power utility and a firm closely linked to the nation's policy elite, said on Monday that he and four other top executives would resign over a scandal involving the falsification of reports to cover up damage at nuclear reactors.

The scandal came to light last Friday, more than two years after an employee at the unit of US-based General Electric Co. which conducted the safety checks told authorities that there appeared to be problems with Tepco's reports.

Critics said the sluggish official response was symptomatic of a deeper problem - the cosy ties which for decades have linked top companies, their official overseers and politicians in a triangle of mutual interests.

LONDON -- General Electric Co. has agreed to buy British oil drilling pipe-maker Wellstream Holdings Plc. for 800 million pounds (US$1.3 billion), as GE continues its push into the offshore oil services industry.

GE needs all the help it can get right now, with its stock hurtling closer towards $0 on a daily basis. The company obviously stands to benefit from infrastructure buildout, and from capturing its share of green (energy) dollars. The more wind-turbines we erect, the better for GE.

The corporate behemoth’s creative use of tax deferral strategies, shifting much of its reported income to foreign subsidiaries, has shed new light on how multinational corporations oftentimes pay little to no taxes. GE not only paid no federal income taxes on its $14.2 billion in profits last year, but even claimed $3.2 billion in tax breaks. A New York Times article last week pointed out that GE employs a 975-employee tax department run by a former Treasury Department official, John Samuels. The department is sometimes known as the world’s best tax law firm, and also includes former officials from the IRS and congressional tax-writing committees.

Stewart is like a lot of people who know things that just aren't so. The Supreme Court never ruled that corporations are persons. It is not in any ruling. A clerk responsible for publishing Supreme Court cases wrote that in some introductory remarks, and corporations and others who saw the value in the assumption took it and ran with it. Now it has become established lore, but that is all it is.